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Transaction Cost Economics: the Natural Progression†

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Transaction Cost Economics: the Natural Progression† American Economic Review 100 (June 2010): 673–690 http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi 10.1257/aer.100.3.673 = Transaction Cost Economics: The Natural Progression† By Oliver E. Williamson* The research program on which I and others have been working has been variously described as the “economics of governance,” the “economics of organization,” and “transaction cost eco- nomics.” As discussed in Section I, governance is the overarching concept and transaction cost economics is the means by which to breathe operational content into governance and organization. The specific issue that drew me into this research project was the puzzle posed by Ronald Coase in 1937: What efficiency factors determine when a firm produces a good or service to its own needs rather than outsource? As described in Section II, my 1971 paper on “The Vertical Integration of Production” made headway with this issue and invited follow-on research that would eventually come to be referred to as transaction cost economics. The rudiments of transaction cost economics are set out in Section III. Puzzles and challenges that arose and would require “pushing the logic of efficient governance to completion” are examined briefly in Section IV. Concluding remarks follow. I. An Overview For economists, if not more generally, governance and organization are important if and as these are made susceptible to analysis. As described here, breathing operational content into the concept of governance would entail examining economic organization through the lens of con- tract rather than the neoclassical lens of choice , recognizing that this was an interdisciplinary ( ) project where economics and organization theory and, later, aspects of the law were joined, and ( ) introducing hitherto neglected transaction costs into the analysis. A predictive theory of economic organization was the object. The puzzle of vertical integration was an obvious place to start. A. Governance Whereas textbook microeconomic theory was silent on the concept of good governance, John R. Commons, who was a leading institutional economist during the first half of the twentieth century, formulated the problem of economic organization as follows: “The ultimate unit of activity … must contain in itself the three principles of conflict, mutuality, and order. This unit is a transaction” Commons 1932, 4 . Commons thereafter recommended that “theories of econom- ( ) ics center on transactions and working rules, on problems of organization, and on the … [ways] the organization of activity is … stabilized” Commons 1950, 21 . ( ) † This article is a revised version of the lecture Oliver E. Williamson delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 8, 2009, when he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. This article is copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2009 and is published here with the permission of the Nobel Foundation. * Williamson: University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, S545 Student Services Bldg., Berkeley, CA 94720–1900 e-mail: [email protected] . This paper has benefited from my presentation of an early draft to my colleagues( and students at the University of) California, Berkeley and from subsequent discussions with Steven Tadelis. Ongoing support from the Haas School of Business at the University of California. Berkely is grate- fully cknowledged. I have grave doubts that I would have undertaken the project described herein but for i my inter- disciplinary training at Carnegie Mellon University where economics and organization theory were joined( ) , ii my experience as Special Economic Assistant to the Head( of the Antitrust Division at the US Department of Justice) (which) revealed the need within the antitrust enforcement agencies to bring economics and organization theory together( , and iii the opportunity to work these issues through with my students at the University of Pennsylvania when I resumed) teaching.( ) Teaching is learning, especially if the students buy into the project. ( ) 673 674 THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW JUNE 2010 This conception of economics is to be contrasted with the neoclassical resource allocation paradigm in two important respects: first, whereas Commons viewed organization and the con- tinuity of contractual relations as important, the resource allocation paradigm made negligi- ble provision for either but focused instead on prices and output, supply and demand; second, whereas the price theoretic approach to economics would become the “dominant paradigm” during the twentieth century Melvin W. Reder 1999, 43 , institutional economics was mainly ( ) relegated to the history of thought because it failed to advance a positive research agenda that was replete with predictions and empirical testing Stigler as reported in Edmund W. Kitch 1983, ( 170 . Stalwarts notwithstanding, institutional economics “ran itself into the sand.” ) This does not imply, however, that institutional economics was lacking for good ideas. Indeed, the Commons Triple of conflict, mutuality, and order prefigures the concept of governance as herein employed—in that governance is the means by which to infuse order, thereby to mitigate conflict and realize mutual gain. Furthermore, the transaction is made the basic unit of analysis. James M. Buchanan 1975, 225 subsequently distinguished between lens of choice and lens ( ) of contract approaches to economic organization and argued that economics as a discipline went “wrong” in its preoccupation with the science of choice and the optimization apparatus associ- ated therewith. If “mutuality of advantage from voluntary exchange is … the most fundamental of all understandings in economics” Buchanan 2001, 29 , then the lens of contract approach is ( ) an underused perspective. The past 35 years have witnessed growing interest in the use of the lens of contract, to include both theories that emphasize ex ante incentive alignment agency theory mechanism-design, ( / team theory, property rights theory and those for which the ex post governance of contractual ) relations is where the main analytical action resides. Transaction cost economics is an ex post governance construction, with emphasis on those transactions to which Commons called atten- tion—namely those for which continuity or breakdown of the exchange relation is of special ( ) importance. How did the attributes of such transactions differ from the ideal transaction, in both law and economics, of simple market exchange where no such continuity relation was implied ? ( ) What were the governance ramifications? Answers to these queries would entail reformulating the problem of economic organization in comparative contractual terms by i naming the key attributes with respect to which transac- ( ) tions differ, ii describing the clusters of attributes that define alternative modes of governance ( ) of which markets and hierarchies are two , iii joining these parts by appealing to the efficient ( ) ( ) alignment hypothesis, wherein iv predictions would be derived to which empirical tests would ( ) be applied, and v public policy ramifications would be worked up. Antecedent to the foregoing, ( ) the contract relevant attributes of human actors would be named and explicated. B. Organization Whereas the neoclassical theory of the firm treated the firm as a black box for transforming inputs into outputs according to the laws of technology, this was not, as Harold Demsetz 1983, ( 377 observed, an all-purpose construction. It is a “mistake to confuse the firm of [neoclassical] ) economic theory with its real-world namesake. The chief mission of neoclassical economics is to understand how the price system coordinates the use of resources, not the inner workings of real firms.” Although Demsetz did not make the case that economics and organization theory should be joined in a combined effort to understand firm and market organization of a real world kind, that is nevertheless the research need and opportunity as I perceived it—in no small measure because of my training 1960–1963 in the PhD program at the Graduate School of Industrial ( ) Administration, Carnegie Mellon University. This remarkable program in interdisciplinary VOL. 100 NO. 3 Williamson: Transaction COsT Economics: The Natural Progression 675 social science made the case that organization theory should both inform and be informed by economics.1 Herbert Simon, James March, and Richard Cyert played especially important roles2 in putting this across. Considerations of bounded rationality, the specification of goals,3 intertem- poral regularities wherein organization takes on “a life of its own” , the critical importance of ( ) adaptation, the reliance within the operating parts on routines, and, more generally, the “archi- tecture of complexity” were all basic concepts that would prove to be pertinent to an understand- ing of incomplete contracting and complex organization. Had the governance of contractual relations come under study at Carnegie Mellon, there is no question that this would have been examined in an interdisciplinary way. C. Transaction Costs Ronald Coase, in his classic 1937 paper on “The Nature of the Firm,” was the first to bring the concept of transaction costs to bear on the study of firm and market organization. The youthful Coase then 27 years old uncovered a serious lapse in the accepted textbook theory of firm and ( ) market organization. Upon viewing firm and market as “alternative methods of coordinating production” 1937, 388 , Coase observed that the
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